What's your strongest memory of school?

Do you remember it as a time of exploration?

Was it a place where you could figure out who you were and what you wanted to become?

Or did it feel like it wasn't made for you?

Did it feel constricting like a place with lots of rules

about how you had to act and what you couldn't do? Your experience of schools likely dependent on the

administrators who ran your school, who the teachers were, how your city or state set up the

curriculum, and the resources your school received. And as writer Eve L. Ewing argues, that experience could also be

shaped by who you are. What has school meant for students and who influenced how schools

function the way they do? And what are alternatives for how school could work for students?

Eve joins us after the break. We discuss her latest book, Original Sins, the miseducation of black and

Native children and the construction of American racism. She's the writer and professor of race

and education at the University of Chicago. I'm Jen White. You're listening to the 1A podcast. We'll be back

with more in a moment. Stay with us.

Joining us now from Chicago is Eve Ewing. Eve, welcome back.

Jen, it's wonderful to talk with you.

Even your introduction, you write that Original Sins is not a prescriptive how-to guide to fix our schools.

But what questions or ideas did you want to explore?

You know, this is really a book that is about the role that schools have played in making the

United States what it is. And I think that because so many of us have just our own memories of school,

and we don't always talk about those with other people, we assume that those experiences are universal and they're not. And basically what I want to argue

is that schools haven't just sort of stood by the sidelines reflecting as a mirror, a racist

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